In October 1962, I was 13 years old and a freshman at Georgetown Visitation Preparatory School in Washington D.C. I have a few rather faded memories of the Cuban Missile Crisis…. My father had been a Cuban diplomat stationed in DC, but by 1962 he had resigned from his job and embarked upon a new career with the Inter-American Development Bank. My school friends and teachers would question me as if I had inside information about the outcome of the standoff between Kennedy and Khrushchev! I didn’t. My most vivid and frightening recollection is the stockpiling of food staples in a windowless room in our basement on Massachusetts Ave…. in case of a nuclear attack.